"You [the critics] are there to give us some perspective on how truthfully and skillfully creative works are speaking to power, and to point out when they are not. You are our visionary guides. The great critic is to an artist as the great psychotherapist is to a patient or the great editor is to a writer. You have the insight to see the artist's best potential and the talent to help elicit it. The big difference, of course, is that the advice is not privately conveyed, but broadcast to the general public. You are, in effect, the host of an ongoing conversation between art and the political and social culture of the moment. It's a conversation, I might add, that is not as alive and well in today's world as one might wish." (from "Seeing the Critics as Critical," keynote address to the National Critics Conference, May 26, 2005 as quoted by Eleanor Heartney in Critical Mess: Art Critics on the State of their Practice, a nerdy, but interesting collection of essays.)
Here's another great quote; this one's from Haruki Murakami's recent essay in the NYT. Although he's writing about fiction, I like to flatter myself that the same principles apply to all kinds of writing (even art criticism). "Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won’t keep reading your work. I learned the importance of rhythm from music -- and mainly from jazz. Next comes melody -- which, in literature, means the appropriate arrangement of the words to match the rhythm. If the way the words fit the rhythm is smooth and beautiful, you can’t ask for anything more. Next is harmony -- the internal mental sounds that support the words. Then comes the part I like best: free improvisation. Through some special channel, the story comes welling out freely from inside. All I have to do is get into the flow. Finally comes what may be the most important thing: that high you experience upon completing a work — upon ending your "performance" and feeling you have succeeded in reaching a place that is new and meaningful. And if all goes well, you get to share that sense of elevation with your readers (your audience). That is a marvelous culmination that can be achieved in no other way."
